UC students semester one grades up on 2010
Turns out on average you did pretty well… though if you did poorly, don’t worry about it; you’ll be totally fine. Chin up, and all that.
UC student grade point averages over the first semester this year were slightly up on the same time last year, according to research by the Psychology department.
An analysis of grades of students in PSYC105 showed that, while average final exam marks were down slightly on those achieved last year, other grades were much the same as those in the same class last year.
Professor Simon Kemp, who headed the research, says that although aegrotats this year have been "a little more generous than you'd normally expect", results from multiple choice tests, which are unlikely to be affected by changes in conditions between the two years, show very similar or slightly higher marks.
Furthermore, Professor Kemp's team surveyed most of the class' 585 students as to the more psychological problems they'd had since the earthquake. The results showed that this group had not done quite as well as groups that were not so affected.
"So it raises the question for me, if the averages stay the same, and these guys are doing worse, then if for some reason you haven't gotten badly psychologically affected, maybe you're doing a little better [than last year]," Professor Kemp said.
Professor Kemp offers a few ideas as to why this might be the case. "There's lots of different explanations floating around – one is that we kept the better students, which is possible; I'm not 100% convinced, but some people believe it. Another is that there are fewer distractions."
But Professor Kemp says it may also be that people just got more motivated.
"If you ask around the staff, you'll find that everyone has their own little story of it. Mine goes like this: I walked into my [first post-earthquake lecture] for a particular third year class. It's in a tent. I show up thinking 'oh god, no one's going to turn up'. You get there, they're all there, they're all waiting, and pretty keen to get on with it. It was pretty moving to see it, actually."
"You'd intuitively expect all of this to have a really big effect, and yet it doesn't. People don't seem to be much affected by it."
For more details of the research, see Professor Kemp's UC profile, or consider taking one of his classes: http://www.psyc.canterbury.ac.nz/people/kemp.shtml
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